My body is a wonderland (and an ecosystem)

A friend just sent me this posting from Marginal Revolution on a very unique bug I had heard but not read too much on, called Toxoplasma. This parasite is pretty widespread in the vertebrate world, where it was first described to alter the interaction between rats and cats. Basically, the bug lives in the guts of cats, and then gets pooped out into the cat's feces, which are then eaten by rats, and the bug in turn infects the rat hosts. In order to complete the circle of life, though, the bug has to get back into the cat, and it achieves this not apparently very easy task by altering the rat's neurochemistry: it makes the rats less averse to risk, which in turn makes the rats more likely to be eaten by cats, thereby getting Toxoplasma back to its rightful place in the cat's gut. Pretty cool from a community ecology/evolution.

The kicker, though, is that Toxoplasma also lives in humans (lots of humans), and according to recent work, may have the same effect on us it does on rats: Individuals infected with Toxoplasma were six times more likely to get into a car accident than non-infected individuals. Just another reminder that the complex stuff we call a human may be a bit more like an entire ecosystem than just one organism.

Who was charged with possession of drug paraphanelia?

Great find: picktheperp.com - you get pictures of different, real perpetrators from police mug shots, and you have to pick which perp committed which crime. Fun for all ages! Also, just really interesting to see your own tendencies and thought processes about the physicality of crime. My best streak so far is four in a row.

I found this on Sociological Images, which has a ton of other really interesting stuff which is worth checking out.

truth as approximation

I just finished watching Obama's speech at the correspondents dinner. First, it's very refreshing to have a president that is circumspect and confident enough to be able to poke fun at himself and his administration. The picture of Obama sitting down for a conference with Captain Hook I thought was particularly tasteful.

But I actually thought the best moment was towards the end of the speech, around 15:25 in the youtube video, when Obama was addressing in a fairly serious manner the state of modern media and their importance in society, etc. When listing a bunch of other values, Obama said "we look to you for truth, even if it's always an approximation," which was followed by a burst of laughter in the audience. Despite the laughter, I had the feeling that it was not actually intended as a joke, and the audience just sort of didn't get it. Either way, though, I think it highlights what a monumental shift we've had from the last man in charge. I mean, recognizing the heuristic difficulties of truth prediction is something of a far cry from "the axis of evil."

The end is nigh...for real

Oh my fucking god, they finally made a robot with a living brain. Seriously, it's a physical robot attached to a living brain, that grows new neural connections and learns about its environment, built by Kevin Warwick, who is apparently totally insane. Once again, we should have seen it coming.

The Pope is not a scientist

Overall, I would say the science of public health is probably not the Catholic Church's strong suit:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/03/20093183550676229.html

Wisdom in the Age of Schizophrenia

I apologize for the delay in posts for those 3 or 4 of you devoted readers there are. This is a post I've had stewing in my head for a while and am finally getting around to writing down a few preliminary words about.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about, or more precisely being vexed by, what I perceive to be the shifting and kind of unsteady landscape of knowledge in our modern world. I'm thinking about things kind of across the smorgasbord, from facebook, twitter, and the blogosphere overloading us on connectivity, to cheaper and faster genome sequencing and biotechnology, to the impossibly complex abyss of the financial system. As I immerse myself more and more in this world (for better or for worse), I have a deeply ambiguous feeling about its effects on me, and by extension our modern society. On the one hand, it seems incredibly cool and also incredibly important that knowledge is being democratized. On the flipside, though, I can't help but feel that something, some element of depth of understanding, is being lost in the face of all of this complexity, and this is what I'm trying to wrap my mind around. As a beginning to what I intend on making a series of posts, I just want to bring up a few issues I've been thinking about as of late.

1. Is wisdom a meaningful idea anymore? It seems to me that one of the classical distinctions between wisdom and simple knowledge was that wisdom entailed some sort of intuitive understanding, where knowledge implied simply learning or retaining a piece of information in your brain. Does this have any meaning for us when the things that we are trying to "intuit" are multi-dimensional, microscopic, or beyond the scope of our senses? Is evolutionary computation, which I've talked about a bit before, an example of how we can incorporate the "wisdom" of our decision making into much smarter thinking machines than our own minds?

2. What should be the role of emotion in our decision making? Without going in too deep into details of emotional decision-making theory, it seems pretty clear to me that developing emotions is really important in our ability to cleave through the complexity of the world and ignore some decisions that don't really need to be made. If nothing else, it's a useful filter. In the face of so much information, how is the role of emotions going to change, since in my experience, emotions (at least those involved in decision making) develop slowly, something which seems to be at odds with the current pace of information processing and gathering.

So, just stew on those for a while, and I'll be back with more thoughts soon!

DIY cells

After watching by this talk by Juan Enriquez, which i highly recommend, I followed up on something he mentioned in his talk that I found kind of amazing. Specifically, Enriquez was talking about the rapid development in the field of engineering cells. In particular, there's been a lot of focus (most conspicuously by bioentrepeneur Craig Venter) on being able to engineer unique living cells that are stripped down to the most basic possible genetic machinery, and this has turned out to be a very promising field. So, the site that I followed up on was this: The Registry of Standard Biological Parts. What a spectacularly mundane name for such an amazing thing. As Enriquez described, it's basically radio shack for cellular engineering. It's a list of "parts," or bits of cellular machinery with very specific functions, with a list of who you can get them from, so that people can put together new cellular machines. Really eerily similar to an electronics catalog...

Purity (or why Woody Guthrie refused to eat at the kitchen table)

I've been reading along a couple of divergent lines recently. I'm taking a class on conservation biology, so I'm reading a lot about species diversity and disruption and how landscapes change in response to human activities. On the flipside, I also just finished reading "It Still Moves" (by Amanda Petrusich), a book about finding the roots of Roots music, or Americana, told mostly through a road trip to a splattering of important American music cities and filled with vignettes about local business shacks, Cracker Barrel meals, and hours on the highway. Despite the differences in content, however, there is a theme blaring out from the pages of these two readings, and that theme is purity.

I'm not sure I really have anything particularly profound to say about this subject, but it just struck as odd that what lies at the heart of so many different arenas of life is ultimately the search for purity of some kind (usually paired with a not-so-glancing blow at the evils of modern life which are continuously spoiling the pure and lovely past).

In music, and especially in American "folk" music, there is a wide following for finding, documenting, and preserving the purest, most unadulterated American music. This is more or less explicitly why lots of the old folkorists and archivers would go to jails to make field recordings, because these were presumably little time capsules where artists that learned to play before they were put into jail remained untouched by modern music. Although this is certainly not true of all folklorists, and certainly not all folk musicians, there is undeniably a strong tendency within folk and roots music to have a bias towards the past as pure and the modern as almost viral.

Conservation Biology is just bathed in the same kind of contradiction. There is some inherent value in untouched wilderness and areas that have not been altered for long periods of time, whereas anything that has been tainted by modern man loses something automatically. In some ways, I find this kind of backwards. There's no inherent reason why a "pristine" wilderness is any different than one that has been affected by human activity, and it seems rather that change and adaptation are quite the norm in the natural world, seeing as 99% of species that lived in the "pure" past just didn't make the grade and went extinct. Ultimately, I just wonder why there seems to such a universal psychological drive to maintain the past as pure and valuable.

Possibly my favorite story about this subject is about that legend of cowboy and american music, woody guthrie. Guthrie is often turned to as a potent symbol of the rambling singer/songwriter, outlaw, drunkard, romantic, dabbler, and just about every other sign you can tack onto him. He provided source material and inspiration for a whole generation, including the likes of Dylan, Seeger, later Wilco, etc. Guthrie was also seen by many as the living proof of an otherwise theoretical construct in the minds of lots of folklorists of the wandering dust-bowl refugee, the working man's hero. My favorite deflationary story about this myth is when he was at the house of the famous folklorist Alan Lomax. Guthrie was often welcomed into the Lomax home, and they offered him lots of basic comforts, which he would often refuse. He refused to sleep on the bed offered to him, and instead slept on the floor covered in a jacket, just like a hobo. Instead of eating at the dining room table, Guthrie would only eat at the sink. Bess Lomax found his antics "annoying," and complained that he was only pretending to be a hobo. For this, Guthrie is one of the great enigmatic symbols of American history, I think. Maybe he was only comfortable in the wayfaring life he had indeed lead, and didn't know how to exist in the comforts of modern society. Maybe he was just trying to inflate his own personal mythology. Maybe he did it because it annoyed the Lomaxes. Maybe all of these, who knows. Either way though, it was very american.

Competition, Farms, and the Democratization of Innovation

Undeniably, we are now living in a world that is exceptionally complex. Although the world may not be any more complex and dynamic than it was a few centuries or millenia ago from a physical perspective, it seems clear that from a social perspective the world has skyrocketed in its complexity, especially since the industrial evolution and the process of "globalization." It also seems clear that this trend will almost certainly continue exponentially in every sector of life. From the personal and social connections we make to financial markets and international governance, the world is getting bigger and more interconnected.

In general, I find this to be a pretty hopeful and beautiful thing: knowledge is being democratized (by the internet, as well as big-minded projects like PLOS and One Laptop Per Child) and I think for the first time we are really able to actually imagine the solutions to problems that are fundamentally international in nature (e.g. the drug trade, hunger, poverty, and especially global environmental issues).

This new kind of world, though, is also going to bring about a whole new set of problems. This was highlighted for me recently during the beginning of the economic shitstorm when I was listening to an NPR interview, which was actually about artificial intelligence. What stuck with me about the interview was the discussion of the computer programs that determine what happens in the financial markets. Obviously, the financial markets are too complex for anyone to predict in their specifics. And so, lots and lots of shareholders (which i think include private, small-time investors, although I could be wrong about this, I know embarrasingly little about the world of money) put sort of preset "sell" mechanisms on their holding. So, if the values of certain stocks fall below these setpoints, it can start a sort of wave of selling, which then can sort of reveberate out through the market. What was amazing, and sort of shocking to me, was to hear that not only is this very complicated (and apparently important) system being run at least in part by a bunch of computers, but that the effects were so complicated that nobody could figure out what happened, so that they had to write other computer programs to figure out what the other computer programs were doing!

So, this is scary because (a) the machines are taking over (huge vindication for all the sci-fi nerds), but also because (b) it represents how we've created mechanisms in the world that can themselves gain complexity and then sort of go beyond our ability to easily understand and control.

So, long introduction, but this got me thinking about how things like innovation, regulation, and control are going to have to change in this new way-too-complex future. In particular, I think we're going to have to come up with "smart" systems for understanding and controlling these very complex global systems.

One model for this that I find very intriguing is called "evolutionary computation," from computer science. From what I understand, evolutonary computation is a name for lots of different styles of computation that involve creating iterative programs that will progress slowly towards a "fitter" solution through many generations of calculation.

One example is from architecture. Imagine there is some leeway in how you can arrange some structural elements (maybe "struts") spatially in a building, but you want to find the best arrangement. And you know that you want to maximize some aspect of the building, let's say "toughness." People are creating programs that will randomly generate a whole variety of different arrangements of struts (the parallel of mutations in a natural population), and then they test all these different arrangements for "toughness." The specific arrangements of struts that perform best get to have "offspring," or new arrangments that are roughly like them but with some more mutations, and then the whole process is repeated. The result is basically that the program roughly imitates the smart processes of evolution and designs something all on its own.

Although this is a rough example, I think it still points to a useful direction in how we can sort of "decentralize" the analytical thought process. I think the same kind of thing can apply to societies. If we can figure out ways to bring innovation and analysis away from central "brains," such as centralized policies or governments, and out into the rest of the world, this opens up tons of new possibilities. And, it may even be the only way to move forward as the mechanisms of the world (such as financial markets and the internet) become too gigantic for a centralized brain to handle easily.

So, as a final endpoint, I want to bring this around to what I've been getting really interested in recently: local farms. I've recently started volunteering at a local organic farm, and I've been incredibly impressed with the innovative and dedicated work that is being done with basically no resources and very little overhead support from either a government or an academic institution. They're working on projects to build a solar-powered kitchen, expanding the visibility of good food by bringing it to impoverished communities for very cheap, having a roving biodiesel delivery system for their crops, and tons of other stuff. My point is that this is what we need more of: small-scale, decentralized innovation and problem-solving. In the spirit of Thomas Friedman, I think the best way for us to stay competitive in the modern world is to decentralize the system of innovation and encourage people to make change on the grassroots level (something that would seem especially appropriate in the age of Obama). There's lots of smart people out there with ideas that could make swift and effective change. Let them do their thing.

Rhythm and synchronicity

This excellent TED lecture by Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz has really gotten me thinking about the role of rhythm in life, biological, human, and otherwise, and I highly recommend it. The lecture covers some really interesting examples of how rhythms, or what he calls examples of "sync" arise spontaneously in everyday situations.

One familiar example from the biological world is schooling (in fish and birds, etc), where are all of the movements of tons of individuals are coordinated to give the impression of choreographed action. As it turns out, schooling works on some pretty straightforward principles. He shows a mathematical model of schooling each individual's behavior is determined by some exceptionally simple rules: each individual is only aware of those nearest to it, all individuals tend to line up in the same direction, and that all of the individuals are attracted to each other, but keep a set distance between them.

Strogatz also goes over some less animate examples of spontaneous sync. He shows that two metronomes will sync up if you give them a way of "communicating" with each other mechanically, which in this case was a mobile platform that he put both on. Also pretty cool was the example of how people's footsteps tended to get into rhythm at the opening of the Millenium Bridge in London in 2000, which caused the entire massive bridge to start wobbling and had to be temporarily shut down.

Pretty cool examples of how rhythms can arise between individuals spontanteouly, and they all seem to really interesting example of the larger idea of emergence. Since watching the lecture I've been thinking about the pervasive rhythms are in life that I don't really notice most of the time (traffic patterns, cadence of conversation, moods, everything seems to have its own rhythm on some scale).

More than anything though, it reminded me of all of the old church, gospel, country, and other "americana" music I've bene listening. Especially in the old gospel stuff (especially Goodbye, Babylon and Classic Southern Gospel), there's some really energetic in so many of the songs that's hard to put my finger on, and I can't help connecting it in my mind to this sort of spontaneous development of alignment and rhythm between people. Many of the recordings are field recordings, so the recording quality is often poor, but the blistering energy and rhythms come through clear, and it's kind of amazing that people would so frequently and so universally get together to make music. I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but why does it make so much sense for people who are thinking something (about God, or poverty, or teen angst, or love, or whatever) to get together and make sounds in rhythm together, from the church choir to the transcendent drum circle to the dance club? It would make a lot of sense to me that people are expressing something really fundamental and instinctive that comes out in music, something that stretches way beyond human life into the rest of the living and even non-living world. Well, in addition to it just being fun...

With a wave of his (very long) finger...

...the trader made lots of money.

Apparently, according to a new study in PNAS, the size of men's fingers might be to blame for the financial crisis (sort of). The study found that there was a direct correlation between the relative size of a male trader's ring finger and how much money he made in the market. Specifically, the research measured the ratio between index finger length and ring finger length, so that a low ratio means you have a relatively long ring finger.

Even cooler is that there is a potential mechanism for explaining this relationship. Previously, it's been shown that having a low index:ring ratio (and therefore a long ring finger) means that a man will be more sensitive to changes in testosterone levels. This means quicker reactions and more willingness to take aggressive risks, which are also apparently useful in trading. I wonder if a hand print will now become part of the application for i-banking.

Bizarro Me

Just found this guy's website. "Jimmy-Jimmy" aka James Crall. I think I see the future